The Inescapable Self in Anselm’s Prayers to the Saints

It seems to me that a key issue that Anselm grapples with throughout his prayers to the saints is how the self is to seek God when it is the self that is causing the distance.  How is Anselm as a sinner supposed to find the strength within himself to start on the path towards healing, when the self that must find the strength is so sick? It seems a hopeless putting-the-fire-out-from- inside-the-house kind of situation.  In his anguished exploration of his own disease and his attempts to gain the mercy of the saints and the Father, he unfolds how complex the concept of self is as it pertains to God. On the one hand, he recognizes a certain “true self,” given to him by the Creator, that he should be working back towards - “Reconcile me to myself” (“Prayer to St. John the Baptist,” 213), he begs of his Creator and Saint John the Baptist.  In this particular prayer it is especially clear that this “myself” is his created state, pre-Fall and sinless. True, born post-Fall he was born in the “old rags of original sin” (56), but by his baptism he was “re-made” (85) by God, “clothed in the garments of innocence” (57); “You refashioned your gracious image in me” (66), he claims. Washed and remade in the image of God, in this state he is as the Creator intended him to be. 

However, if this is who he truly is, it is also clear that he is truly something else. Sin has pushed him far from this true self.  He laments how he has “superimposed” (68) the image of sin on the image of God, and knows that by the removal of such sins, he might do what he was meant to do - offer praise back up to the Creator (166-68). However, though these sentiments might suggest that his created, baptized nature is really there, subsisting below the image of sin, a temporary layer, it is abundantly clear in most of his language that he has been utterly changed by sin, made into a new self that is a stranger to this authentic self that he knows to be from God. “What was I, O God, as you had made me - and how I have made myself again” (41-42), he mourns, and “my sins have made me what I am” (33).  He has been recreated, as it were. Thus the confusing doubling that happens in his plea, “Restore me to myself”: both “me” and “myself” are, in his thinking, who he is. He yearns to become “myself,” the created self that is his from God which he sees as his true self, but at this moment he is “me,” a sinful self that he very truly is in the present. This doubling is most powerfully present at the beginning of the long passage where he tries to incite himself to escape himself - “Flee, flee, you who are of I know not what horrible substance; flee from yourself; be terribly afraid of yourself” (101-103). Here there is the subject who flees, who tries to leave behind the corrupted self that has separated him from God, and the corrupted self he flees from.  Yet the language here admits that in actual point of fact there are not two selves - the person fleeing is indeed the one of “horrible substance.” Thus, this true created self, this being made new after baptism, is who he is only insofar as Anselm recognizes it to be so. He grasps it with his reason, knows it to be his true self, who he should be, but it is not actual, a reality of existence. Reason might encourage him to flee, but in the end it is hopeless, for the fleeing subject is the same as the one he flees from. 

Anselm does acknowledge outright that this reason is powerless to help him.  As he says in his prayer to Saint Paul, “In fact, if I did see the reality I should not feel it or be moved by it.  Reason teaches this, but my heart does not grieve. I see this because it is so, and alas that I do not dissolve entirely in tears because it is so” (“Prayer to Saint Paul,” 79-82).  He knows one thing to be so, the reality of his fallenness, but here he laments that he cannot experience that knowing. Without this experience, there can be no change - he cannot “dissolve.”  With vivid, visceral imagery he conveys throughout the prayers how this self corrupted by sin is a hardened self, one that he is entirely trapped by - he describes how he is locked in the “chains of sin” (“Prayer to Saint Peter,” 128), “fast in despair” (“Saint Paul,” 122), “silent and insensible” (123), “Buried... hardened” (119), and ultimately “dead” (245).  His condition is all-consuming and totally binding, such that he cannot get beyond himself; his knowledge of this condition, purely cognitive, is inadequate. He requires an all-consuming reaction for an all-consuming problem - not knowledge, but understanding.  He writes, “... I did not grieve, as if unfeeling.  I knew through my rational nature, but I did not understand; death had made me insensitive” (263-266).  Understanding here is linked with grief and feeling, and speaks to a softening of the insensible self, a dissolution of the hardness.  It is the ability to feel again, the experience of the knowledge. This grieving is the first step on the path to recovery, for it gives the sinner hope of healing, and with this hope he may at last approach God, may know how to pray (86-90).  And for Anselm, it is through the saint that this softening is made possible. As he pleads with Saint Paul, “Sir, sir, come down upon this dead man; stretch yourself upon this dead man; make yourself not dead, but like the dead man. Let the caress of your compassionate touch make the dead man warm…” (282-286).  He begs the empathy of the saint, not that he meet Paul in his glorified state, but that Paul would meet him in his (Anselm’s) fallen state, and fit himself to him. He wants perfect community with this human who was once on earth, who himself was once hardened against God, and hopes that if he can rely totally on the saint’s relationship with God, insert himself into it, then he, too, might ultimately be softened, and might know how to approach God. 

Overall, Anselm seems very interested to me in dealing with what it is to be a human in the world, the grit reality of this present life - the painful, inescapable immediacy that comes with living in time, living mortally.  In other words, what it is to be a body.  It is not enough for him to simply know, to grasp a truth by means of reason; he wants to experience what he believes.  The visceral terms in which he describes his predicament speak to the fact that he has a very real and physical presence on earth, inside time, that cannot be denied, contrary to the promises of the Platonists or the Stoics.  Humans can know the creeds to be true, but that does not alter the fact that they must work through reality, all the pains of the present, who they really are at this very moment, even though they might know they were created in His image. The remedy required is equally visceral - weeping, grieving, dissolving.  Bernard of Clairvaux’s first kiss (Song of Songs I, Sermon 3, p. 17). Here community with the saint can come into play - a glorified human who once worked through the all-encompassing nature of sin, the very real condition of not being what you know you are meant to be, and by the grace of God overcame it. 

- JM

References

Saint Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion. Translated by Benedicta Ward. London: Penguin Books, 1973. 

Bernard of Clairvaux. Song of Songs I. InThe Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Vol. 2, trans. by Kilian Walsh. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1971.